Saturday, February 28, 2009

Las Vegas A Truly Amazing Race For ESPN

After two seasons of Nationwide Series telecasts, the third time was the charm for the NASCAR on ESPN team. Las Vegas was the third race of the 2009 season and may well be remembered as the best NASCAR event televised since the network returned to the sport.

A brief over-run of college basketball moved the first several segments of the NASCAR Countdown show to the ESPN Classic Network. Allen Bestwick teamed with Dale Jarrett and Brad Daugherty to present a program that included lots of Las Vegas references and color. Rusty Wallace had the weekend off.

It was when Jarrett moved up to the announce booth that something unfolded that NASCAR fans have not seen from the telecast team. ESPN finally put all the pieces of the Nationwide Series jigsaw puzzle in place. From the drop of the green flag through the overtime ending, this was the kind of live event coverage that fans originally expected from The Worldwide Leader in Sports.

The TV team stripped all the unwanted extras from the telecast and focused the entire four hour production on the racing. Mike Massaro moved from the studio to pit road and led a team of reporters that finally dropped the hype and focused on interviewing drivers out of the race and keeping things updated for TV viewers.

Dr. Jerry Punch is a new man in 2009 and his focus on simply calling the play-by-play action has resulted in a new on-air dynamic. Even after almost four hours and with a green-white-checker finish looming, Punch was excited and setting the scene for the fans.

Without Punch continually asking questions of his analysts and using the same tired catch-phrases over-and-over again, Jarrett and Petree have come alive. This may have been the best telecast for Andy Petree since he joined the ESPN team. Petree was outstanding in his knowledge and understanding of the events and strategies unfolding in the race.

Jarrett used his best skill in this event and that is listening. Rather then step-in and try to help Punch with the call of the race, Jarrett took the role of his father and added his opinion when it was needed. The timing was perfect as Petree and Punch really took the lead in this telecast.

Ultimately, the biggest contribution was from the producer and the director of the race. Gone from the telecast was the loud music into commercial. Gone were the endless ESPN promos. Gone was the fascination with only reporting the positions of the Sprint Cup Series drivers. This live event was balanced and represented the first real hardcore racing telecast from ESPN in a very long time.

Even after the race running more than thirty minutes over the scheduled timeslot, ESPN2 stayed for a live interview with the winner. This smart move, even for the second-tier Nationwide Series, will leave a lasting impression among the fans.

What was your reaction to the Nationwide Series race telecast on ESPN2? Please feel free to add your comments by clicking on the comments button below.

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48 comments:

JD- Almost nothing tops the picture of UNC fan DJ in a Duke blue shirt.

I could not find a live race feed on the FOX Sports website for the race. I wonder whether that is due to its being an EESPN race or a victim of the economy. I'm sure FOX Sports had the FOX Trac running for N-wide races last year.

I'm betting things were all around better because of the exciting action on the track, plus the Cup drivers causing the most trouble. They didn't have time for all that excessive drivel that we're used to seeing. Remember AP said he needed to catch his breath.

I couldn't agree more. Finally, a NASCAR race free of the annoyances that we are forced to endure the rest of the time. Three solid announcers, two more than competent pit reporters. This was the way ESPN used to cover NASCAR and, until today, I didn't realize how much I missed it. I just hope that the powers that be at both NASCAR and ESPN recognize the quality of today's broadcast, and offer their viewers more of the same in coming weeks.

I definitely enjoyed the telecast much better today and I certainly hope that this is something that will be coming when they get the Cup series as well. It was definitely one wild race and the broadcast team did a great job of keeping my attention.

I enjoyed the broadcast. That's not a surprise to me though because in my opinion the ESPN Nationwide coverage (but for a few bumps in the road) was very solid last year as well. The issue last year was good Saturday broadcasts not translating at all to Sunday.

I was pleased with today's results, but last year taught me to never use a Nationwide broadcast as any kind of gauge as to whether or not anything has positively changed at ESPN. So I'm still far from optimistic looking ahead to the Cup cars hitting the track at the Brickyard, but I certainly hope my doubts are proven to be unfounded when that time comes.

As a final thought, I wonder how many people that don't work for Fox Sports were screaming things at their TV's today like "Boy this race coverage would actually be enjoyable if there were screaming and dancing cartoon characters covering up the race cars!" or "Boy ESPN really dropped the ball by letting the TV viewers see all the positions decided live on their TV screens! TV viewers that spend 3-4 hours watching a race waiting for that last lap should always have the rug pulled out from under them once the leader trips the line and be forced to read the Internet or their newspaper to know any results beyond first place!"

It's nice to see you on record giving well-deserved kudos to Dr. Jerry Punch. I'm sure you got tired reading all the posts from trolls who said you had a private grudge against Dr. Jerry or were bitter after leaving ESPN.

I just hope Punch can keep it up. In the same way he gets tired on long telecast days, he gets tired over a season. It's a long way off until the Cup races are handed over to Punch - I hope by then he doesn't revert into the bingo-style numbers calling of the past.

Great last paragraph. It seems like they throw all this extra window dressing in a race to justify unnecessary positions on the production staff or to impress other networks. It has nothing to do with us as consumers of their product.

It was refreshing today to not have music videos or goofy clips of drivers coming back from commercials - they just came back to a camera shot of the racing.

@hotaru--ESPN stays with live events and will move the upcoming event to one of the other channels if one is available. 99.99% of the time Classic is airing repeat throw away shows but when the College Football season starts then pretty much every ESPN network is filled to the brim and we're left channel surfing trying to see if the Countdown is anywhere.

The only time that they move a live event is if it's on network TV and due to the TV window they have no other option. i.e. network may let them run 5 or 10 minutes in but not an hour.

I hope ESPN sees how much money they can save and present a better race. Frequently, less is more as it was in this case. Maybe ESPN is tightening their belt due to the economy and it will give us better racing.

The list of what was gone was missing one.The time interval,that was gone.Put up less than 20 times.Now keep in mind ESPN runs the names and interval on the same line this year.So it takes no more space than the running order. Maybe Espn will drop the down and distance on football games.Baseball games they could remove the count and outs from the screen.Basketball they could remove the 24 second clock.I'm sure fans of those sports would approve.Just look at this blog tonight.

I knew ESPN could do it! Someone must have watched their race coverage from the 'old days' and realized they could just show the race and make fans happy! Let's just hope they remember this for the Cup race. Great job on the coverage today.

My husband watched the entire race with me and was totally engaged, so that tells me all I need to know about the coverage.

Not to throw water on all the positives. This race was very unusal. Lots of Cup guys making errors, Kyle out early.

The real test will be a race with long green runs, Cup guys up front. Will they still cover more of the drivers through the field. Certainly hope so?

Regarding interval. Totally agree. Intervals are to racing what all the "data" mentioned by Kang are to other sports. For example,if your favorite driver is in 15th and not being discussed are they 8 secs behind or 30? This would tell you if they were competitive or about to be lapped. You can also tell lap by lap if they are keeping up with leader or falling behind.

Totally agree about lack of "bells & whistles". Just good racing info. Please take note ESPN Cup and FOX.

I only saw the second half of the race, as the ESPN coverage has usually been pretty poor. I'll be there at the start for the next race, hoping they keep up the sort of work they did this week. Finally looks like time to welcome ESPN back to NASCAR

Anon 9:39AM-Fox trying to cater to everyone is exactly the problem. They try to please everybody and end up pleasing nobody. If you program for the true fan, you will gain more true fans. If you try to cater to everyone, you will gain nothing. The casual fan will not gain respect for the sport with the gimmicks and more dedicated fans will get frustrated and leave.

I enjoyed the whole race coverage, from Countdown on ESPNCL to the checkered flag (and they even squeezed a decent interview in with Greg considering how much they'd run over.) We just hope this will be the blueprint for Cup races later in the season. And remember, race fans, even though we get 'switched', the same was true for those NCAAM fans looking for their game.

I think interval time is critical, especially on spread out races. Needs to be up more often. You can't tell who is moving closer to the leaders without it.

You know a broadcast team has done a good job when you look back on a race and don't immediately think of some way the broadcast team has overshadowed the race itself. You think of the race- the way it ought to be.Good post.